


Never Went Home

by evadne



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Death, Fairy Tale Retellings, Implied Cannibalism, Reichenbach, Violence, somewhat dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 04:56:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/858041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evadne/pseuds/evadne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is realer and more human than anyone Molly's ever known, and she will do anything to protect him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Went Home

_Morning, again_

Molly opens the door, and says, ‘It’s done.’

 

Sherlock says, ‘I don’t believe you.’ And Molly is not surprised, because she knew Sherlock never believed her capable of this. This is because Sherlock doesn’t know who Molly is, or what she has already done, long before today, when she was still too young and weak to so much as swing an axe.

 

‘Outside,’ she says. ‘He’s in the car. There’s woods, not far from here, where we can take him.’

 

‘Do you know your way around these woods?’ Sherlock says, with a slight sneer. ‘He’s hardly going to help us if we get lost. That’s assuming you really have got him in your car, which I still don’t believe.’

 

Sherlock never believes anything without evidence. That’s one of the things Molly likes about him. ‘I’ll show you,’ she says. ‘And don’t worry about the woods.’

 

 _Once you’ve been through them once_ , she wants to say, _you learn that the flowers are a map, and you learn how to read it. You learn that getting lost is the real way out, and that if you never leave the path you’ll be lost forever without knowing it._

 

Sherlock wouldn’t understand that, though. This is Sherlock’s first time in the woods, and he doesn’t even know he’s there. Luckily, he has Molly here to protect him.

_Evening_

‘If I’d known I was going to end up on the run with _you_ ,’ Sherlock says, ‘I’d never have faked my death.’

 

‘You’d rather be dead for real than stuck in a cottage in the French countryside with me?’ Molly says.

 

‘I really hope you don’t expect me to be _nice_ to you now,’ Sherlock says.

 

 _No,_ Molly thinks. _I’ve known two people – or two who pretended to be people – be nice to me, really nice, complimentary and attentive and gentle. But never you. You'll flatter me to get something you want but you've never tried to consume me with it. Even when you touched your mouth to my cheek at Christmas you were holding back. You’d never pretend to be a warm place so I'd walk on in, never envelop me in manufactured almost-real affection. I wouldn’t be here if I thought there was ever any danger of you being_ nice.

 

But she brought flowers back from the forest as well as an axe, and she knows when to hold up which, so she looks at the floor, and she says, softly, ‘No,’ and no more than that.

 

‘I have work to do,’ Sherlock says, ‘so don’t talk, and try not to think too loudly.’

 

‘Is this about Moran?’ Molly says.

 

‘Don’t read my files,’ Sherlock snaps.

 

 _Don’t leave the path_ , Molly thinks. ‘Too late,’ she says, and gives him her best awkward smile. ‘Sorry.’

 

‘Well, unless you happen to know something about hunting down mysterious assassins who lurk in the shadows, maybe you should –‘

 

His tone is mocking, as though he thinks the concept of ruthless lurking assassins is silly. She interrupts him. ‘There’s no question of hunting. You’ve already worked out where he is, haven’t you? This is the end of the hunt. Not tracking, but killing.’

 

‘Oh, and thatyou are an expert on?’ Sherlock says. ‘Is _shutting up_ really that –‘

 

‘I brought a syringe,’ Molly says, interrupting again. ‘I can inject air into one of his veins and bring on an embolism. His heart should stop fairly quickly.’

 

Sherlock stares at her. Eventually he says, ‘Healthy men in their late fifties don’t just drop down dead. Someone will suspect.’

 

‘No one will look for symptoms of an air embolism in a man who’s had his belly torn out,’ Molly replies.

 

_Morning_

Three weeks after Sherlock falls, Molly is woken at three a.m. by her phone beeping.

 

_JM still has one associate left. He is not yet suspicious of you but he is having everyone I regularly spent time with watched in case they reveal something. You need to break this phone – make it seem accidental – after you read this, and then you need to tell your boss that working at the place where you saw me plummet to my death is unbearable at the moment and beg for a week off to go to France and get away from it all. He’ll say yes._

Ever since she first left the path when she’d been told not to, Molly has been very careful about when to obey orders and when to disobey. Straying is dangerous, never straying more so. Choosing when is important.

 

But Sherlock is a man who never gives an order without good evidence that it’s the right order to give. He doesn’t share that evidence, of course, but Molly understands very well the appeal of keeping one’s own counsel. He is nowhere near as good a liar as he thinks he is, nor anywhere near as dangerous. There’s no risk that he might be a wolf. He’s as human and real as she can imagine anyone being.

 

She will not obey his orders because she loves him. He believes love to be a dangerous disadvantage, and she knows better than he does how right he is. She also knows that love is the only thing that keeps people going when they’re finding their way out of the woods, and that it is wholly necessary. Love should be felt, deep and hard, but it should be kept in check. You grip your flowers tightly in one hand and heft your axe over the shoulder with the other, that’s how it’s done.

 

No, love is beside the point. She will obey Sherlock’s orders because she trusts him. Because he is the most human human being she’s ever known, and he’s alone in the woods with no axe. Everyone deserves to get a woodcutter once, and she will be his.

 

_Afternoon_

She’s always liked flying, watching the darkest of woods become dots she could squeeze between her fingers. Though today she doesn’t have much time to watch them. She’s making plans.

 

Sherlock must be protected. She owes him that: she brought the wolf who tore his life apart straight to him. Moriarty would have found Sherlock anyway, of course, but Molly let him see Sherlock and John together, sniff out that raw bleeding wound.

 

After the first time, the time when she was a child (at least, she was a child at the start of it) she should have been able to recognise a wolf when she saw one. But she didn’t, not till its claws came out, and its big eyes saw Sherlock and its big teeth did their level best to eat him. Molly saved him, but the work of saving him isn’t done yet.

 

You only get one woodcutter, of course. The night she broke up with Jim Moriarty and saw for the first time how big his eyes and teeth were, she knew no one would come for her. But by then she had an axe of her own, and an armful of flowers, and she knew that the only way to get anywhere was by getting lost.

 

The woodcutter who saved her postponed the day when she would learn how to hack her way out of the dark while drowning in intestinal juices, but she bears him no resentment. He was just doing the same as her, although he’d got a little further along: trying to locate the seam he could break open with his axe to find the way out of the story.

 

She made it out, of course, only to find that the story followed her, but now the wolf wore a human voice and had even softer words to make up for his lack of soft fur. She wonders if the woodcutter ever escaped. John Watson reminds her a little of him, though if it is him he doesn’t remember. Or if he does, he hasn’t said anything. But then again, who would want to own up to being only partially real?

 

And John is - or was, and hopefully soon will be again - living with Sherlock, who is so real, so painfully real. Shadow and echo people, like Molly (and maybe John) are drawn to him helplessly. Will do anything for another moment in the heat of his realness, his humanity.

 

At any rate, John isn’t here. Sherlock fancies himself his friends' woodcutter and has left them in the dark to go and find an axe.

 

 _I will bring him an axe to break the story apart, and flowers to make a new one_ , Molly promises herself. So long ago now, since she stopped in the woods to pick flowers and found herself tugged into the story. By the time it was done the flowers were wilting under the weight of the blood that soaked them, but she took them with her anyway. After all they’d led to, she couldn’t leave them behind.

 

_Morning, again_

‘I’m not sure that there even are any wolves in this part of France,’ Sherlock says.

 

‘You’re new to the forest, Sherlock,’ Molly tells him. ‘There are always wolves.’

 

_Night_

‘I like the first part of the plan,’ Sherlock says, ‘but I’m still unclear as to how Moran’s stomach is going to get ripped open, or how that’ll make it look like an accident.’

 

It’s the third time he’s said this. He’s standing in the hallway, watching Molly step through the door, hand slipping into the big inside pocket of her red hoodie yet again to make sure the syringe is safely there.

 

‘You need to trust me,’ she says. ‘I’ll be back by early morning with his body.’

 

_Morning, again_

‘You’re actually trying to tell me that your plan is to wait in the woods for wolves to come and rip him open? I don’t know why I trusted you when I knew your intelligence level –‘

 

‘You trusted me because you hated being alone in the dark,’ Molly says. ‘And you’ll keep doing it for the same reason.  The wolves have my scent now, they think they know me, and they’ll come for me, for the flowers, for the story. Wolves will always underestimate you, it’s important to remember that. They see you as a thing for eating, they forget you’ve got teeth of your own. And that a bunch of flowers is as good a place as any to hide an axe.’

 

‘Have you lost your mind?’ Sherlock says.

 

‘There aren’t always woodcutters,’ Molly says, ‘but there are always wolves. It doesn’t matter where I go, they always find me. I spent years trying to get away, but that’s not the way to do it. You run, they chase you. But I’ve got seeing eyes and hearing ears and grabbing hands and an eating mouth as much as they have, and I’m not going to run now. I never got back home, in the end, but you will.’

 

‘This is –‘ Sherlock starts, and is cut off abruptly by a noise. Coming in over the harsh wind blowing through the trees, the distant sound of howling.

 

Molly touches her tongue to her canines, imagines the sun glinting off them as it starts to rise, imagines them sinking into flesh. Her mouth is as dark as a forest, as dark as the inside of a wolf. ‘Wolves travel a long way to mate with other packs,’ she says. ‘No one will be surprised that wolves came here, and only a little that they attacked someone. I just need to lure them over to where we are, and it’s better if you’re not there for that.’ She touches Sherlock’s arm. ‘Go back to the car.’

 

Perhaps it’s cruel of her to leave Sherlock out of it. He’ll never understand what happened here, and he’ll hate that.  But though woodcutters are meant to be good and brave and strong, they are not meant to be kind. She has put all the weight of the axe amongst flowers into her voice, and Sherlock obeys her, walks back towards the car. They’re still on the path, so it won’t be hard for him to find his way back.

 

The path isn’t where Molly belongs, though, and hasn’t been for years. She locks her arms around Moran’s body and drags him away into the woods.

 

The wolves are still too far away, but they will come when they scent blood. Molly only needs to make a beginning.

 

She wonders if she’ll feel guilty, after this is all over and Sherlock’s safe. Moran’s no wolf, after all. But he served a wolf, which is perhaps worse. What sort of person, on finding themselves lost, makes a deal with the wolf to serve up others for him?

 

 _What did Moriarty say to you?_ Molly wonders. _What could he have said to make you do the things you’ve done? Did he speak to you as he spoke to me, and how far did he get before you let him buy you? Maybe he didn’t even have to finish the sentence. Perhaps you asked about his mouth, his big toothy pit of a mouth, and he started to tell you what it was for. Perhaps he said_ All the better to _and you saw at once what he meant, what he was going to say, and laid a finger on his furry lips and swore you’d find him prey rather than become prey yourself._

She kneels down by Moran’s body.  ‘All the better,’ she whispers to it. ‘All the better.’

 

She opens her mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Let's Write Sherlock challenge 2](http://letswritesherlock.tumblr.com/post/53511388655/challenge-1-is-still-open-until-june-30-but-were): rewrite a fairy tale with characters from Sherlock. 
> 
> Things this draws on -  
> [Little Red Riding Hood](http://pitt.edu/~dash/type0333.html#perrault), by Charles Perrault  
> [Little Red Cap](http://pitt.edu/~dash/grimm026.html), by the Grimm brothers  
> Earlier versions of the story in which the wolf tricks the girl into eating the grandmother. I only know these from _The Great Cat Massacre - and Other Episodes in French Cultural History_ by Robert Darnton.  
>  Carol Ann Duffy's take on the story in _The World's Wife_ : 
> 
> At childhood’s end, the houses petered out  
> into playing fields, the factory, allotments  
> kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,  
> the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,  
> till you came at last to the edge of the woods.  
> It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
> 
> He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud  
> in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,  
> red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears  
> he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!  
> In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,  
> sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
> 
> my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.  
> The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,  
> away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place  
> lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,  
> my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer  
> snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
> 
> but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,  
> breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.  
> I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for  
> what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?  
> Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws  
> and went in search of a living bird – white dove –
> 
> which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth.  
> One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,  
> licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back  
> of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.  
> Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,  
> warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
> 
> But then I was young – and it took ten years  
> in the woods to tell that a mushroom  
> stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds  
> are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf  
> howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,  
> season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
> 
> to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon  
> to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf  
> as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw  
> the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.  
> I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.  
> Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.


End file.
